We have previously reported on the carbon conversion work of Meyer Steinberg, at the USDOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory, in upstate New York.

Herein, we see that, thirty years ago, our United States Government assigned itself the rights to a US Patent it awarded to Steinberg, for technology that enables the conversion of Carbon Dioxide, as reclaimed from the atmosphere, into Methane, Methanol and Gasoline.

We have been documenting that considerable effort has been put into the development of technologies for economically generating Hydrogen, so that it could be employed to hydrogenate the primarily carbonaceous liquids derived from Coal, and thus convert those Coal liquids into hydrocarbons more compatible with our current transportation fleet's liquid fuel refining and delivery infrastructure.

Now posted on the West Virginia Coal Association's web site, for instance, are reports of two United States Patents issued to Consolidation Coal Company, "USP 3188179 - Hydrogen from Hydrocarbon Gas and Steam" and "USP 3115394 - Process for the Production of Hydrogen", wherein they disclose technologies developed specifically to generate Hydrogen for the purposes of Coal liquefaction.

Pittsburgh's old Gulf Oil, long since absorbed into the Chevron collective, had, as we've been documenting, devoted themselves, along with their Pittsburg, Kansas, P&M Mining subsidiary, to developing an extensive and impressive array of Coal conversion technologies, that, had they ever seen the light of day, would have enabled the energy-efficient conversion of Coal into a range of liquid and gaseous fuels and chemicals.

Herein we present an interesting, and very complicated, example of the Coal conversion technologies this Coal Country petroleum company managed to develop before being assimilated into Big Oil.

The full patent disclosure, as available through the link, is lengthy and very complicated, and beyond our ability to reduce into a full and truly comprehensive synopsis.

As you should, from our posts, by now know, the old Union Carbide Corporation, now a component of Dow Chemical, operated, for a time, several decades ago, a Coal hydrogenation plant that made liquid hydrocarbons from Coal, in South Charleston, West Virginia.

Again, we have documented both that Coal conversion facility's existence and multiple patented Coal conversion technical innovations that were inspired by it's operation.

Herein is another of those patented technical innovations, but one which reveals a new, but now unsurprising, piece of information.

In a very recent dispatch, we alerted you that scientists in Korea had been awarded a United States Patent for technology that enables the conversion, the recycling, of Carbon Dioxide into valuable hydrocarbons.

Herein is that patent, with comment appended following excerpts from the enclosed link: